Market adoption of wireless LAN (WLAN) technology has exploded, as users from a wide range of backgrounds and vertical industries have brought this technology into their homes, offices, and increasingly into the public air space. This inflection point has highlighted not only the limitations of earlier-generation systems, but the changing role WLAN technology now plays in people's work and lifestyles, across the globe. Indeed, WLANs are rapidly changing from convenience networks to business-critical networks. Increasingly users are depending on WLANs to improve the timeliness and productivity of their communications and applications, and in doing so, require greater visibility, security, management, and performance from their network.
As enterprises and other entities increasingly rely on wireless networks, monitoring and management of the components implementing the wireless network environments become critical to performance and security. Heretofore, it has not been recognized how important visibility into all layers of the network protocol is to optimization of network manageability and user performance in wireless LANs (WLANs). Unlike centrally-managed cellular wireless systems, known WLAN solutions use distributed access points to act as bridges between the wired infrastructure and the wireless clients, removing all physical and wireless media access protocol information from the protocol frames that are passed onto the infrastructure network. This results in uncoordinated handoffs of wireless clients moving between access points. An uncoordinated system of access points makes it difficult to manage a large number of access points, because there is no point of coordination. For example, known prior art wireless network systems such as conventional 802.11 systems provide the initial handshaking, access authentication and access association at a remote node without attention to overall network loading and signal quality.
This type of distributed architecture creates many problems affecting network management, mobility, and performance. Since each wireless LAN access point is a separate managed device, distributed architecture in general introduces many new managed elements in the network without sufficient attention to their global effects. Since the access points act in their own self-interest and are not aware of the actions taken by surrounding access points, they handle mobility (e.g., handoff actions) as a local event, which significantly increases latency. U.S. application Ser. No. 10/155,938, identified above, discloses a hierarchical wireless network architecture that optimizes network management and performance of a relatively autonomously-managed WLAN. According to the system architecture, a central control element manages and controls one more access elements. These light-weight access elements perform real-time communication functions, such as data transfer and acknowledgements, while the central control element manages the connection between the access element and one or more wireless client devices.
Configuration and management of wireless network systems incorporating many managed access points can be complicated and time consuming. For example, configuration of the access elements and/or central control elements in the hierarchical wireless network architecture disclosed above can be complicated and/or time consuming, especially where large number of access elements and central control elements are deployed. In wireless network environments, it is desirable for the operation of access elements to be coordinated to enhance the performance of the network. For example, in the wireless network environment disclosed in U.S. application Ser. No. 10/155,938, hand-offs require the cooperation of two central control elements. In traditional networks, hand-offs require the cooperation of two autonomous access points. Accordingly, discovery of neighboring devices is critical to this goal. Conventional network devices typically support a variety of layer 2 or 3 discovery mechanism that allow for discovery of devices over wired networks for tasks such as automatically locating and associating with a central management device upon initialization. However, many discovery mechanisms do not work across Local Area Networks or different LAN segments without being configured with higher-layer addresses. This can be problematic to the coordinated operation of two neighboring access elements connected to two different LAN segments. The prior art technologies would require network administrators to manually configure the two elements to allow for coordinated operation.
Accordingly, a need in the art exists for methods, apparatuses and systems that facilitate the deployment, configuration and management of managed access elements, such as autonomous access points in conventional wireless networks or access elements in hierarchical wireless network systems. Embodiments of the present invention substantially fulfill this need.